FIREBIRD 2015 A.D. (1981) * ½

In the future (you know, five years ago), all cars are outlawed.  The Department of Vehicular Control (DVC) stands guard waiting to blow up any “Burner” (driver) that might venture into the wild for a joyride.  Red (Darren McGavin) is a wily old Burner who reconnects with his estranged son Cam (Robert Charles Wisden) over the love of his car, a souped-up Firebird.  The father and son bond while taking the Firebird out for a spin across the barren desert, which puts them on the radar of the DVC.  When the DVC kidnaps Cam’s girlfriend (Mary Beth Reubens from Prom Night), he and his old man set out to get her back. 

Firebird 2015 A.D. has a cool premise, but the execution is sorry and sloppy.  Despite having a kernel of a good idea, it never quite pops thanks to the sluggish pacing and the far-too-many subplots that gum up the works.  The lovey-dovey shit with Cam and his tomboy dune-buggy-riding girlfriend should’ve been excised right from the get-go (although it does inject the movie with some short-lived T & A).  Trust me, if anything makes a sappy romantic interlude less effective, it’s a dune buggy.  You also have to deal with scenes of a deranged DVC agent going native (literally) as he dresses up in warpaint and begins shooting at and blowing up cars indiscriminately.  The stuff with Doug McClure as the ineffectual head of the DVC falls flat too, mostly because it’s hard to buy McClure as a villain. 

Unfortunately, this is more The Last Chase than Mad Max.  In fact, the future doesn’t look all that bad.  It just sort of looks like Canada.  To make matters worse, there are hardly any races or chases on pavement.  Instead, we get a lot of scenes of cars driving over fields, deserts, and plains, which just doesn’t have the same feeling.  It also doesn’t help that the chase scenes are sorely lacking energy or excitement. 

The scenes that revolve around humans are even weaker.  I did like the part where Reubens tried to seduce Wisden by teaching him to drive a stick though.  The father/son sequences work up to a point, but only if you imagine McGavin is still playing the same dad he played in A Christmas Story.  I mean as far as leading men of dystopian futuristic car chase movies go, McGavin feels like a strange choice.  Ultimately, even his finely tuned performance is unable to save this Firebird from the junkyard.